Here is a sample of George Eliot's sad, brave humanist agnosticism from her novel of Florence in the time of Savonarola:
Beings Unvisited by Angels
....No radiant angel came across the gloom with a clear message for her. In those times, as now, there were human beings who never saw angels or heard perfectly clear messages. Such truth as came to them was brought confusedly in the voices and deeds of men not at all like the seraphs of unfailing wing and piercing vision,–men who believed falsities as well as truth, and did the wrong as well as the right. The helping hands stretched out to them were the hands of men who stumbled and often saw dimly, so that these beings unvisited by angels had no other choice than to grasp that stumbling guidance along the path of reliance and action which is the path of life, or else to pause in loneliness and disbelief, which is no path, the arrest of inaction and death.
George Eliot, Romola, in The Best-Known Novels of George Eliot (Modern Library edition: New York), p. 1163.
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